Count on few consolations from Hill's new collection: the first book to be
published by this English poet during a decade of living abroad and teaching
at Boston University, is as severe and wrathful as the old testament God evoked
by its title, epigraph (Judges 3:7) and morally deserted landscapes (which move
between World War II, contemporary British politics, and biblically- imbued
psychic spaces). Miltonic cadences infuse England's "common plight"
in "Dark-land": "Whereto England rous'd, / ignorant, her inane
/ Midas-like hunger: smoke / engrossed, cloud-clumbered, // a spectral people
/ raking among the ash." But like his literary ancestor Jonathan Swift,
Hill's jeremiads never accuse without self-implicating gestures-poems whose
Humean titles such as "Whether the Virtues are Emotions" and "Whether
Moral Virtue Comes by Habituation" recall the reader-friendly rubrics of
philosophy, but fragment into opaque half-lines, Dickinsonian in their solipsistic
moral indictments. Hill also elegizes a range of poets, including Stefan George,
Ivor Gurney, William Arrowsmith, Alexander Blok, and Christopher Okigbo, as
well as a plotter against Hitler, Hans-Bernd von Haeften: "Could none predict
these haughty degradations / as now your high-strung / martyred resistance serves
/ to consecrate the liberties of Maastricht?" Following the vatic judgments
of Eliot's Quartets and the moral astringency of Penn Warren, Hill's erudite,
exacting style leaves us with difficult questions and few reasons for complacency:
"There being now such riotous shows of justice, / yet, of righteousness,
the fading nimbus / remains to us, as a perceived glory" ("Mysticism
and Democracy").

This volume of occasional prose by an American master spans nearly four decades
of writing, and graciously pays tribute to both canonized and neglected poets.
Justice's exceptionally calibrated prose matches well the ambitious range of
his investigations. In a dozen essays and selections from two notebooks, the
poet's role in culture is subtly analyzed, sometimes diagnosed; the title piece
is an uncompromising discussion of artistic immortality, concentrating on, among
others, the missing person-and missing poet-Weldon Kees. Equally impressive
are arguments on the genealogy of the free-verse line through Stevens and Pound,
reminding us that their contributions were not isolated miracles but products
of brilliant influence. The notebook selections are eclectic and at times witty,
collecting personal anecdote, playful ideas ("a play . . . Lorca in California
. . . 1999 . . . Reagan has been governor for generations") and fragments
of poems-in-process. If the American poet's objective is "to purify the
dialect of the tribe," these arresting observations prove that Justice
has done more than his share, in poetry as well as prose.

"Dura" is defined by the OED as "the dense, tough, outermost
membranous envelope of the brain and spinal cord." This book-length poem
is divided into seven sections, reading like seven versions of the same letter-each
challenging the limits of its transmission. Though each section has its own
particular formal system, there is a shared vocabulary. The real blurs with
the surreal ("Go see your mother / When does she eat / She doesn't have
legs"), strangely precise, shorthand description ("The goat's spindly
hold on rock") and minimalist lists ("ant-hole sieve / dog apricot").
Also notable is Kim's synaesthetic use of punctuation. In one section colons
appear before sentences, signaling a desire for equivalence that isn't met.
In the same section they acquire a rhythmic function, a kind of double-tap of
the toe. In others, colons head the page in pairs like titles, or dividers.
Translation animates the book, whose project could be described in Kim's own
words, an "Invention where the tomatoes dangling from one end are not the
tomatoes hanging from the other end." As "Dangling" becomes "hanging,"
Kim demonstrates how quickly equivalencies dissolve.

The quiet politics of Joseph Lease's Human Rights is nothing short
of astonishing. He juxtaposes fairy tale and myth with confessional or personal
passages, often indicting the "I" in the process. In "Ode,"
he writes, "When you first wrote about me I didn't like it. // I
didn't recognize myself in what you wrote. Do you recognize yourself in this?"
Just as he splices prose poetry with couplets, he continuously splices authority
with the undercutting of that same authority. In "Slivovitz," there
are Holocaust survivors who by now "have grandchildren / I have no right
to picture." These poems are concerned with morality and justice, yet the
implication of the speaker/self saves them from didacticism. In the prose poem
"Listen with Pain," Lease writes, "I want to get in the big purple
laundry basket, you could wash me in that." Lease's voice passes smoothly
from tragedy to joy, from homelessness to mall life; his poems are amazing their
scope, subtlety, and in their movement from wide angle shots in "Creases"
("God is so tired that everything / sits in God's mouth // like the taste
of salami from last night") to close-ups, as in "Apartment" ("under
the covers I would pull down my pants and writhe around in an exaggerated parody
of cringing, demeaning myself before the Queen").

"I like divorce. I love to compose / letters of resignation," begins
the darkly comic and startling "No Return," and immediately we hear
the savage wit and rhetorical intelligence sustained throughout this valedictory
collection. Rising above its sentimental title, the book's recurring themes
are "ordinary fear" and a disappointed, middle-aged love which "will
do its very / best not to consume us." Keeping his sense of absurd humor,
Matthews impressively untangles the eccentricities of human nature from the
recesses of language. Oxymorons, redundancies, even poetry readings: the occasions
of speech move him to illumination. At his most adventurous, he makes use not
only of a personal mode, but also an historical one. Figures ravaged by calumny
and terminal illness- Nixon, Mingus and Matthews' own wife-do not soften his
tough approach. This poet never asks for our pity; like Houdini, he mystifies
us, but doesn't fool himself or his audience by promising a return. He offers
only "the vast loneliness / of prayer."

Although the eminent Dutch writer Cees Nooteboom has published 11 books of
poetry over the past 40 years, this long-awaited collection is his first to
appear in English. Nooteboom writes with a distinctly, even acutely, European
tone, marrying the wry and worldly perspective of Zbigniew Herbert with the
brooding and elemental hermeticism of Paul Celan. Such lofty comparisons are
not merely rhetorical exaggeration; outside the exclusively English-reading
world, Nooteboom's poetry is held in considerable esteem. While the book's appearance,
therefore, is cause for much gratitude, the nature and importance of Nooteboom's
opus demands an even more extensive bilingual edition. As with Celan, the density
of Nooteboom's verbal luggage resists transfer to another language even while,
as with Herbert, his deeply informed intellect crosses linguistic borders with
a certain cosmopolitan ease: "Taciturn as the mouth of shells, / between
praying dogs and the irreverent / fluting of light, / the gleaming gods spoil
in their gold-lacquered beds / wild and useless in their loneliness. // Outside,
their antiquated horses stand waiting. / The jewels have been stolen from the
chariots. / The saddles sit empty, empty the chariots, / coated and ruined by
a mildew of space."

Formalism in poetry can mean neoconservatism, or-as this polylingual, polymorphic
work would have it-etwas ganz anderes. Its title raids that of a late
work of J. L. Austin, the Oxford philosopher of the "speech act" who
famously "failed to say why what I have said is interesting," and
it demonstrates just how astonishingly heterogeneous theory and practice can
be. The book's intricately nested serial structures mimic instruction manuals,
charts and diagrams, dictionary and encyclopedia entries, labels and plaques,
computer printouts and scrolling messages, "creating parallel texts left
and right full of opposing forces in a sad space of alternating dire lexical
black and white squares." The poems (they might as easily be termed "radical
essays") work to defamiliarize, and aestheticize, information as it is
organized and transmitted by the new media. Rather than seeming coldly constructed,
though, the work here is, in the most ordinary sense, enthralling; Retallack's
figures are vertiginously lovely, gesturing toward a kind of cybernetic beauty
for which there's no critical vocabulary as yet. All the more reason to see
it for yourself.

During the last year and a half of his life, Richard Wright wrote more than
four thousand haiku, some 800 of which he included in a manuscript prepared
just before his death in 1960. Nearly four decades later, these last words come
to us as a gift of time. In her introduction, Julia Wright speaks of her father's
work as "poems of light" spun "out of the gathering darkness."
It would seem equally fit to speak of these poems as lessons in living. "In
the falling snow / A laughing boy holds out his palms / Until they are white,"
reads one. Another states: "Not even the sun / Can make oak tree leaves
as green / As the starlight does." Each three-line structure flowers complete-yet
still reaching out: "A sleepless spring night: / Yearning for what I never
had, / And for what never was." In this careful collection of "charmed
syllables" readers will find poems that speak careful words into the healing
darkness, the revealing light. Here is one to start with: "And though level
full, / The petal holds its dew, / And without trembling."

- Robert C. Jones

Originally published in the February/March
1999 issue of Boston Review

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